It really sucks that selling out is not really criticism that holds much ground these days. We live in the age of the entrepreneurial artist, the era of ‘getting your bag.’ We have gone full simulacra; popular artists now aren’t even artists; the majority of them don’t even play an instrument, let alone write their own music. They are just ornaments and decorations on the product. The fact that accusations of selling out are rarely present highlights the ever-dominating homogeneity of the neoliberal culture industry.

The consequence of our contemporary era’s understanding of the utilization of creativity is a desire for control over the emotional/material conditions of life that leaves a wallowing want for more. Contemporary mimicries of creativity are realized as an unauratic, surface-level embodiment of segments of meaning that lost their genuineness long ago—appearing, but like lensless spectacles.

Headphones render life itself into silence. You experience a deep sensorial and emotional inner life, but you withhold that, determining that this is a gift for yourself, allowing it to ring through your head as your ears follow suit. And when you’re forced to go out into the world without your trusty earsidekick—you struggle to rekindle what life used to sound like. An alien in your own commute.

This country needs energy. Imagine the things we could do if we all moved faster, if we all ran and sped TOWARDS change. We need to be running daily, no more walking, NO MORE WALKING. RUN to the polls, RUN to the grocery store, RUN to a psychiatrist and get a stimulant prescription. Run back a month later and ask for a HIGHER DOSE. Run a CELSIUS© down your throat. SWALLOW NICOTINE GUM WHOLE. We need to put our pedal to the metal and MOVE. We’re running out of time.

Multitasking Man is the embodiment of someone who has lost control to their infinite appetite for distractions. Multitasking work with entertainment. The behavior the symptom of a deeply addicted individual, one who lacks agency unless certain stimuli are fried to satisfatory numbess. Only the extent of your ever-dwindling agency is the determiner of whether you rise into productivity or continue swallowing water, sinking into stasis.

The balancing act between genuine and ironic bleeds into every interaction. But all these interactions fluctuate between wanting to express a deeply emotional part, doing it in a half-attempted manner, and then falling into the trap of self-ironic verse. The temptation to self-sabotage passion in the fear of not being heard, enacting the de-connective social act myself, not allowing the other to do it for me.

“No one does it like Sully!” “Mike Wazowski has done it again!” “Classic Mike!” shatters through my head like a sentient dental drill rebelling against its blue-gloved doctorate master. My 9-year-old Wazowski-beaten eyes slip down under their lids, and recede into my head hoping to escape—at least visually—the hell of this media connection.

Consuming short-form content is a process of self-harm. Drawn-out long-form suicide, via short-form bursts of unfeelable pain. The most shameful form of suicide. It is the slow death of your attention span, a slow descent into mental/emotional subordination, the process of losing a temporal grasp of your life. Waving a dilapidated goodbye to your newly disfigured consciousness as you surrender fully to The Entertainment.

Every month I am greeted by a new, increasingly worse UI. Everything degrades, everything rots. But iTunes’s clunkiness and customizability felt more physical if that makes sense. It was pleasantly cumbersome in its depth of options, a right click would lead to 20 different selection bars, each with their own drop-down menus of possible query. Spotify on the other hand, feels like an attack on the intelligence of anyone who uses it.

We’re just pigs at a trough, slopping and having our snouts doused in industrial brown liquid that we not just consume, but find the meaning of alienated life through. And now in the age of fandomization, we pigs can use the internet to tell TV writers and content creators what WE want our slop to taste like! Happily mixing our pigshit in with the slop already fed to us.

Online entertainment media has created a want for novelty only if it is within the relations of trust, the insane level of intimacy they have built with their pre-existing objects of consumption. It’s a form of engagement with already consumed media that thumbnails function to. A thumbnail’s role is in complete relation to trust.